


Red and Green

by quantumvelvet



Category: Nadia Strafford Series - Kelley Armstrong
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:46:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumvelvet/pseuds/quantumvelvet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A set of loosely-connected vignettes, largely character study, each based around one of the traditional Christmas colours.  Touches mostly on Nadia's relationship with Jack, with a section each taking a snapshot of their pasts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red and Green

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joylee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joylee/gifts).



> The second vignette (Red) discusses - briefly and non-explicitly - rape and potential trauma reactions. It is no more in-depth than the novels' discussion of the same, and riffs off of them, but it is present.

**White**

Sometimes, Nadia wonders if the puppy was a declaration of something - or rather, of something other than Jack’s certainty that she needs a dog.  Considering how infrequently he uses his words, she could hardly put nonverbal communication past him.

Nadia’s tempted for a few minutes to name the dog ‘Diefenbaker’, but she’s a German Shepherd, not a wolf, and she’s not deaf, and she’s - well, a she.  The colour’s right, but that’s about it.  The dog is named Gerda instead, and Nadia gives up explaining it after a week.  She’s still sure that the white dog will disappear into the white snow at least once come winter, and is proven right in the first big snowfall.  The dog comes back readily enough, however, and Nadia finds herself hard-pressed to scold her rather than give her a treat for shaking off snow all over a particularly obnoxious pair of guests.

Whether the dog was a message or not, she certainly decides swiftly enough that Jack belongs as a part of their pack; Nadia learns his first visit after he leaves her at the lodge that locking Gerda up when he comes by is futile.  Short as his stay was, it was enough to imprint a puppy on him, and Gerda is all too happy to greet the often-strayed member of her pack.  And howl like a banshee if she doesn’t have the chance to.

It takes two years for Nadia to admit that Jack was right, that she did need a dog.  Not for protection, perhaps - though the dog, despite her usually playful nature, provides that readily enough whenever her owner feels distressed - but for company.  Gerda’s a willing companion no matter the time, and though she has no interest in hot cocoa, she keeps Nadia company through the nights when she can’t sleep.

And even though she continues to get lost in the drifts after the first big snowfall of every winter, she’s worth it.  Especially since her choice of who to shake the snow off on is impeccable every single time.

 **Red**

Six weeks after the last of Sami’s killers are dead, Nadia realizes the nightmares have changed.  Not all at once, but incrementally.  The cabin is familiar, the voices.  The red of the blood smeared on the girl’s thighs.  But the girl is never Amy, now - it is always Nadia, younger, frightened, repeating the same mantra over and over.  Sometimes, she looks down at herself, her real self - or as real as her dream-vessel can be, and sees the blood repeated there, fresh and far too red.  Usually, she doesn’t look down.

There are new voices, too, later, snatches of conversation she’s certain she never heard.  Repressed memory, too fragile to testify.  Those voices, too, were familiar, she realizes.  The judge, the shrinks, all those people who’d decided she was too traumatized - or too dishonest - to put on the stand.  Not at thirteen.

Repressed memory.  The words shake her to the core, and there’s no one to even ask about it.  Her brother, her mother, both have all but disowned her, and she doesn’t know if she could ask her father even were he still alive.  If she could look him in the eye and ask if it had only been Amy, or if Drew Aldrich had done the same damned thing to her.

If it had, it means the people she trusted had lied to her, had decided that if her mind had obscured those details, it had done so for a reason.  And that, more than anything, she isn’t sure she wants to know.

In the end, the dreams abate, as they always have.  In the end, she doesn’t ask, nor does she requisition the medical records which might tell her for certain one way or another.  It isn’t that she doesn’t think it matters; she decides, rather, that it doesn’t change anything.  One way or the other, her road was shaped when her cousin died.  The memories she has, the memories she’s had for the past two decades, are enough.

The nightmares don’t change back, though.  Even though they’re more infrequent now, they’re not the old ones.

 **Gold**

Nadia says yes.

In the end, the draw of the Contrapasso Fellowship - the possibility of it - is too much to ignore.  Jack seems unsurprised when she returns to tell him how the discussion went; she realizes that he knew, even when he told her to make her own decision, what that decision would be.  It is, after all, a golden opportunity, one that is all but tailor-made for her - or she is all but tailor-made for it.

Because of this, she is unsurprised when he warns her to double-check every job as she gets it, more even than she would while working for the Tomassinis.  It is only sense - anything that seems too good to be true probably is, especially when it comes courtesy of Evelyn.

The first job checks out - the man is slime, tied up in human trafficking, and unrepentant.  There is not enough evidence to convict him; he slips through the cracks, and the footage of him celebrating with his wife makes Nadia’s stomach twist.

He does not manage to slip through her fingers.  The high-calibre bullet from her rifle isn’t something he can see coming, not months later, after any but the most persistent threats have stopped.  She celebrates after, once she’s back home and certain that there’s no one on her trail.  She isn’t sure whether it’s a hangover or a sense of guilt that has her feeling ill the next morning.

She doesn’t celebrate after the second job for the Fellowship, unless a sharp, cold sense of satisfaction counts.

The third job brings her to Egypt, and while it’s not quite how she meant to go there, she can’t help but admire the beauty of the desert outside the narrow strip of green, the blue sky and the golden dunes.  She doesn’t admire it quite as much by the third day, when the sand has managed to work its way into everything.

By then Jack has shown up, and while she’s surprised, she realizes she shouldn’t be - operating this far afield is riskier than she’s accustomed to, and she should have called him, really.  The thought of admitting it rankles, so she doesn’t.

They pose as a couple, and no one looks twice.  She does admit she’s grateful for the help when she realizes the mark has two bodyguards who didn’t show up in the research.  She does admit, too, that she’s grateful when Jack suggests staying once the job is done - it’s unlikely anyone connected them with a killing that didn’t even take place in the same part of the city, but leaving too soon after might spark something that would otherwise be no trouble at all.

So once they’ve disposed of anything that might connect them, once they’re sure they’re clean, they spend a few days sight-seeing.  Nadia decides anew that the golden sand is lovely - especially when she no longer has to worry about it fouling her equipment, or blowing up to obscure her vision at the exact wrong moment.

 **Silver**

Once upon a time, when he was young and still believed in much of anything beyond that which his own senses told him, Jack had been confirmed Catholic.  He’d chosen his confirmation saint aiming for travel; even young, he’d wanted to see the world, and that urge hadn’t faded until he’d actually seen it.  Even now, with more of the world than he‘d care to admit scraping the soles off his feet, he’s no good at staying still.  Even if he’d chosen another profession, one suited to families and a stable address and a paper trail, he’d still have been restless.

He’d chosen aiming for travel, but had ended up with missing persons and lost things, and both of those ended up suiting just as well.  If he was inclined to be superstitious, he’d wonder if he’d cursed himself all those years ago; he’s sure there must be some in the parish in which he’d grown up who would say he had.  Not that he’s inclined to seek them out and ask.  Even were it not more of a risk than he’s willing to take, it’s not a place he’d want to go back to.

He’d had a silver saint’s medallion once.  It’s lost somewhere, long ago and miles away, and he never really thinks about it.  He’s not Catholic any more, not even lapsed - lapsed suggests some remaining connection, and he stopped believing long ago.  When silver stopped being for saints’ medallions, and started being for knives instead.  When he realized it wasn’t for guns - that the chrome shine makes you too easy to pick out, and that there’s no real legitimate reason to be flashy anyways.

He still travels, though, is still restless, and still missing, and still lost.  If he ever minded, he doesn’t now - that’s lost with the medallion, long ago, miles away, all but forgotten.  So maybe that choice worked out after all, even if he doesn’t believe in it any more, and silver’s still for other things.

  
 **Green**

Their first kiss is not very romantic.  It is, unlike most acts either prefer, not very planned, either.  It comes in the midst of a competition - for the purpose of training, for the purpose of satisfying Nadia’s competitive streak.  The gear is new, courtesy of Felix - at least, that is how she assumes Jack’s explanation of its provenance was meant to be translated.  One word answers are not quite so complicated when that one word is a name, and that name belongs to one of the more gadget-oriented of their peculiar society.

The world is green, or would be were it not already nearing midnight, with only the full moon in the sky for light, and the air smells heavily of crushed foliage and kudzu and the oncoming storm.  She can’t remember the name of the town later, the one they’re on the outside of, but remembers it is in North Carolina, and once upon a time the name had French origins, and the pronunciation of it, the one time she heard any of the residents name the place, had her hard-pressed not to laugh.

She’s ahead on points by the time the clouds have crowded in enough to make waiting any longer to walk back to the concession road where they’d left the car a significant risk - either of getting thoroughly soaked, or of getting thoroughly lost.  (And probably getting the former in the course of getting the latter.)  It means a win, and instead of claiming a default, she kisses him.  He tastes of smoke and the beer he’d had with dinner, and for a moment he’s too startled to kiss her back.  And then, when she’s almost certain that he won’t, he does - before breaking away and muttering, “Should get back.”

They do, and don’t even get stuck in the mud, though the storm hits with enough force that the road looks like soup when they pass it the next day.  They don’t discuss it before the job’s over, don’t discuss it after, and once she’s back at the lodge, which is just as green but smells of hardwood and lake water, she doesn’t hear from him for two months.  She begins to regret the spontaneous decision, but decides that it might, just this once, be better than regretting not making one, later.  Ironic as it might be, she has Quinn to thank for that - even if she’s sure he wouldn’t approve.

The second time they kiss, it isn’t very romantic, either.  The world is no longer green, and wood smoke permeates everything from the leaf piles burning all around the lake.  It’s Jack who initiates it, this time, and when he vanishes this time, not for quite so long, she realizes that this is going to be a pattern.  Or remain a pattern, perhaps; they have drifted in and out of one another’s orbits for years, and there is no reason to think that this might change now.

It takes Nadia a while to come to terms with this, a while to realize that it changes almost nothing, rather than changing everything.  She is not willing to leave her world entirely, though she finds herself stepping out of it more and more as weeks turn into months turn into years.  And he does not fit into it, not entirely, even if he were willing to step entirely out of his.

It isn’t safe, and some day, somewhere along the line, it might all come crashing down around them.  But for now, it is what it is, and what it is, is enough.


End file.
